Mick Hartley

Theme Time Radio Hour – courtesy of your host Bob Dylan – has been going Around the World for the last couple of weeks (RightWingBob has more details). He’s enjoying himself with these shows. In the first one he plays The Canadian Rockies by the Byrds, then, bizarrely, says, “There were rumours at one point we were going to swap India for Canada – but actually that’s just a rumour I’m trying to start”, and follows with a brief discursion on the origins of the word posh – or at least the story that everyone knows, whether it’s true or not – taking port out starboard home on the boat to India, “to get the more desirable cabins, like Sean Connery would say, on the shady shide of the ship” (laughter in the background).

Then it’s “Hunting Tigers Out In India”, a 1930 song by Hal Swain & His Band. Most people, if they know this at all, would know the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band version. In fact the Bonzos covered a few Hal Swain numbers. There’s a recent CD Songs the Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us, on Lightning Tree, which includes “Hunting Tigers”, plus the wonderful Jollity Farm. I imagine that’s where Bob and friends got it from.

Here’s the Bonzos’ Hunting Tigers, from “Do Not Adjust Your Set”, with intro by a young Terry Jones. And continuing the Python connection, here’s Eric Idle with the Bonzos doing Love Is A Cylindrical Piano from the same show.

It’s odd to think that Do Not Adjust Your Set was a children’s show. It’s largely thanks to the efforts of those involved – the Pythons, the Bonzos – that that kind of humour soon became mainstream adult comedy. Kids’ shows meanwhile, like Grange Hill, went the other way and became all grim and serious. [Kids becoming adults and adults becoming kids: the Sixties in a nutshell.]

For the Bonzos there was always that childish element though: that particular kind of English whimsy, with grown men prancing around in that wearying manic look-at-me-being-very-silly kind of way. They were clever, and they were good musicians, but it never seemed somehow quite funny enough – like the Rutles, for instance, the Neil Innes and Eric Idle Beatles parody: very well done, but, really, why bother?

But Vivian Stanshall made it all worthwhile. It’s impossible to keep your eyes off him when he’s onstage. He was just….funny. From his Wikipedia entry:

Stanshall was often called a “great British eccentric”, but this was a label he hated: it suggested that he was putting on an act and he always insisted that he was merely being himself. However, it is not difficult to understand why he received the label. Neil Innes said of their first meeting: “He was quite plump in those days. He had on Billy Bunter check trousers, a Victorian frock coat, violet pince-nez glasses, and carried a euphonium. He also wore large pink rubber ears.”

He came, not, as you might expect, from Metroland – somewhere like Ruislip or Pinner – but from Walthamstow of all places. He “grew up living a dual life: at home, he would have to speak “properly” or face a beating; on the street he spoke with a broad cockney accent in order to avoid a beating from his peers”.

A few choice quotes from his later “Sir Henry at Rawlinson End”:

“Like the shock of fondling a raw sausage, blindfold, at a gay party …”

“Do you know what a palmist once said to me? She said: WILL YOU LET GO!”

And here’s “Canyons of Your Mind”: